FutureGrid Tutorial: Running an OpenStack Appliance on FutureGrid

Background

This tutorial guides you through the steps of deploying and using an OpenStack virtual environment which can be used for development, testing, education and training activities.

This tutorial uses Nimbus to create a private, single-node OpenStack environment within a virtual machine instance on FutureGrid - essentially using a form of "nested" virtualization to run a single-node OpenStack cloud within a Nimbus instance.

OpenStack is a recently open sourced, IaaS cloud computing platform founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA and widely used in industry. It includes three components:Compute(Nova),Object Storage (Swift) and Image Service (Glance). In this tutorial we only use Nova.

Running OpenStack as an appliance (i.e. via a virtual machine) gives users a sandboxed environment to explore OpenStack and to freely modify its configuration without affecting other users.

The OpenStack appliance is a KVM-based Nimbus virtual machine. Nimbus is installed on several FutureGrid clusters, however only the Alamo cluster is KVM-based and therefore supports the appliance.

The hands-on steps in this tutorial will show you the basic steps necessary to 1) instantiate the OpenStack appliance on FutureGrid using Nimbus and KVM-base virtualization, 2) log in interactively to the appliance, 3) configure the OpenStack environment, 4) instantiate a virtual machine instance within the appliance using OpenStack and QEMU-based virtualization, and 5) log in interactively to the OpenStack instance

Prerequisites

It is assumed the user is familiar with launching virtual machines with Nimbus, specifically how to setup and use the Nimbus cloud client and credentials. If not refer to this FutureGrid Nimbus tutorial.

[user@node nimbus-cloud-client-019]$ ssh root@129.114.32.101
Linux virtual-machine 2.6.35-22-generic #33-Ubuntu SMP Sun Sep 19 20:32:27 UTC 2010
x86_64 GNU/Linux
Ubuntu 10.10
Welcome to Ubuntu!
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/
New release 'natty' available.
Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.
The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.

Launching the VM Hosting OpenStack

On the Alamo cluster, the list of images will show the OpenStack appliance image:

Using OpenStack

Once logged in, there is a text file in /root/ named openstack.txt that describes how to create a project and instantianate OpenStack Compute instances. The following elaborates on the contents of that text file.